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RV Adventure: In Search of Buck Prairie; Page 2
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As Dale and I ride toward our next goal of BPR03 the road improves somewhat. It is still soft dirt, so easy on my paws and of course the wonderful drinking and cooling mud holes. If you look on the map you will see a right angle turn to the east at BPR03. That's the turn in the photo to the right. |
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Riding toward BPR04 the road becomes sheltered more by the tall fir and pine trees. The shade feels great since it is a very warm day. Do you see Dale's bike leaning against the tree as we reach our next goal, BPR04? When you look on the map you will see that there is an intersection at BPR05. |
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| At the top of the photo at right you can see the road we are riding meeting the intersecting east-west road (BPR05). Dale wishes he was fast enough to get here first for this |
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great cooling mud puddle but I'm too fast for him and got here first.
We cross a gravel road at the BPR06 intersection (left). The road immediately becomes soft dirt again, my favorite. |
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Here is where we had a slight navigation problem. We noticed it as we watched our GPS. We passed BPR07 and continued south rather than making a hard right |
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turn as we should have toward BPR08. The photo above is actually south of BRP07 as you will see in the final map on page 3. There was a family parked at BPR07 practicing with their rifles and we did not want to get near them so continued south rather than making the hard right turn as shown on the map. Also that right turn is very faint and the road can hardly be seen although we've since returned to this spot and found it easily. Anyway, this little detour from our plan took us cross-country again and guess what, we had to climb under a fence. Of course I'm agile and had no problem but Dale sure did make a lot of moans and groans. I thought he was pretty silly. Thanks to the GPS we came right back to the trail and found BPR08 |
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which shows a "corral" on the map. As it turns out, we found not only the corral but a house, shed and out-house too. No one was home which was probably a good thing since we were on the wrong side of a lot of "No Trespassing" signs. You can see Dale's bike leaning |
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against the out-house. There is a very nice wood path leading to the out-house which is probably a good thing since it is |
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pretty muddy. The yellow flowers are tulips. They grow wild in this area. In the photo above you can see Buck Prairie Meadow in the distance but I didn't much care, I was headed for the pond to cool off.
Now our goal has changed to find BPR09 which re-joins the gravel road we crossed at BPR06. Here is where we run into more obstacles. The road began to turn into thick, slippery mud. I really like mud because it is cool and fun to play in. But Dale's bike had lots of trouble with the mud. The tires sank into the mud making it very hard to peddle even in the lowest gear. But Dale did it without falling into the mud. If it had been me, I'd just jump right in because I love the mud so much. Well, this mud began to stick to the tires and gather all over the brakes and gears on the bike. It became difficult |
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to brake and shift gears. What a mess, but Dale didn't get mad, he just considered this a challenge and exactly what mountain bikes are made to do. He use to own a bike shop a long time ago and knew lots of people who bought mountain bikes but never took them off-road. That sure seems silly. Why not buy a road bike for the road and mountain bike for this fun muddy stuff?
Next came a big log in our way. Dale just lifted his bike over the log and kept going. He told me a story about seeing good bikers actually hop logs this without getting off their bikes. I didn't believe it. Can you see the GPS on his handlebars and the water bottle on the down-tube (that's bike talk). You can |
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also see his under-seat bag where he carries tools and an extra tube in case of a flat tire. Finally, you can see he has short little removable fenders to help keep the water and mud spray from getting us dirty. He has already removed those fenders but I blame him for all the bad weather lately. We were having pretty good weather until he removed the fenders, now the weather is awful. He should have left them on. We finally made it back to the gravel road at BPR09 in the photo to the right. |
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